Prime Witness (30 page)

“Do we know the window was broken in the garage?” says Goya. “Maybe it was broken someplace else, earlier.”

Sellig shakes her head. “We found minute traces of glass fragments on the concrete beneath the side door of the van. Reconstruction indicates it was broken in the garage. Most of the glass was on the inside of the vehicle. So it was broken from outside.”

“Were there traces of glass under the cord and stakes?” says Claude.

The point here is whether the spray of safety glass from the broken window was all on top of the coiled cord and stakes, or underneath them. If glass was found only on top of the objects it would mean that they were in the vehicle already, when the glass was broken. Iganovich could not wiggle out.

“We looked,” she says. “It’s inconclusive. The items were too far from the window to get a sufficient spraying of glass particles to know.”

Claude makes a face, like it was a good thought anyway.

“There’s another possibility,” says Goya. “Maybe Iganovich broke the window himself to provide a later explanation for the cord and stakes inside.”

This doesn’t wash with Sellig. “Easier just to get rid of the stuff,” she says. “If he was thinking about it, he would have dumped it.” She shakes her head. “No. I think he just didn’t see the stuff as incriminating.”

“Even the bloody rag?” says Lenore.

“Probably an oversight,” says Sellig. “He may have been in a hurry when he dumped the van.”

Claude tells us that the broken window offers more complications.

“Our investigators,” he says, “have identified two other vehicles in the same garage during the same period with insurance claims filed by the owners for broken windows.”

“Vandals?” I say.

He nods, like this is a likely explanation. “Probably kids,” he says.

“Anything missing from the other vehicles?” I ask him.

He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Check it out,” I tell him.

“Why?”

“If there’s personal property missing from the other cars, it means it wasn’t pure vandalism. Whoever broke the windows was looking for valuables inside. When they got to the van, if they did the van, they would have looked inside.”

He looks at me and suddenly it registers. “Maybe they saw the cord and the stakes.”

I give him a smile. It’s the longest of shots, finding juveniles who smash the windows of cars for whatever they can find inside. Still cases have turned on more perilous leads.

It is my turn to report. At noon today I had lunch with Ravi Sahdalgi, the Pakistani graduate student from our grand jury. Over salads at a restaurant not far from the university I picked his brain on the quality of our evidence, and in particular whether Chambers, if given the chance, could confuse a good jury with the evidence in the Scofield murders.

“His testimony was good.” This is how Sahdalgi characterized the evidence presented by Harold Thornton, our psychologist and expert on the theory of criminal profiles. But Sahdalgi said the jury did not totally buy into his theories.

I wondered what he would say if I’d dumped the medical evidence from the autopsy on them. I am confident that had they received the information that the Scofields were killed elsewhere, with a knife rather than the stakes, that they would see distinctions galore between these cases.

Gesturing with his hands as if to assure me that it was nothing that I had done in the presentation of the case, Sahdalgi told me that the similar circumstances of the murders were too much for most of the jurors to overlook. “It is too easy to purchase rope, the clothesline cord. And the stakes. The fact that different ones were used was not particularly persuasive,” he told me.

“And the other things, the missing eye of the Scofield woman, the supposition that the killer knew her.” He made a face like this did not wash with the jury, too much of a psychic reach. In all, Sahdalgi let me down easy, but the message was clear. Had I brought charges against Iganovich for the Scofield murders, the discrepancies in those cases would not have troubled the grand jury greatly. They would have returned indictments in those cases as well.

It causes me to wonder if maybe I’ve made a mistake in failing to charge the Russian with the Scofield killings. It is, after all, possible that, even in light of the medical evidence, the Russian is responsible for the Scofields. These victims were older, perhaps more wary than the others. Maybe it was necessary for Iganovich to use a knife first, and to follow the ritual of the stakes after they were dead?

Goya gives me a perplexed look. “I thought Thornton’s testimony was solid,” she says.

It’s the problem with trying to predict the whims of a jury; nine guesses in ten will be wrong.

“Maybe we should charge him,” says Claude, “with the Scofields.” Emil would love it. Claude doesn’t say this, but the message is clear.

I look at Sellig. She would like to wade in, to argue the opposite view. But lately I sense that on this call she is prepared to defer to the local authorities. She is the penultimate professional; having given us her best rendition of the evidence, the decision now rests with me.

I weigh it only for a moment, Claude looking at me all the while. He is politic enough to enjoy the thought of carrying a pleasant message to a superior.

“We still have a problem,” I say. “We can’t be sure that Iganovich was available for the Scofield murders.”

Lenore nods. “We don’t know if he was still here—or up in Canada when they were killed. If we charge him and Chambers produces hard evidence of an alibi, it could taint the charges on the other four. Play to his theory of defense,” she says.

We all sit, mulling this in silence for a moment.

“It makes the witness up in the trees that much bigger.” Claude finally breaks the reverie.

“Any leads?” I’m asking Claude about this shadowy figure in the trees.

He makes a face. Shakes his head. “We’re still looking. Ran a trace on the spotting scope,” he says. “Six thousand of that model sold nationwide last year. We checked the serial number with the manufacturer. Nothing. Whoever bought it never registered for warranty protection.”

Another dead end.

I’m back to Goya. “How long do you think we have before trial?”

“At a minimum,” she says, “six months.”

I relax a little.

“Chambers can delay any trial at least that long, nine if he really tries,” she says. Enough time for us to chase down the open ends of our investigation, perhaps to find the man in the trees, the figure who is now shaping up as a prime witness.

Stress tortures the human mind in a thousand untold ways. For me during periods of anxiety, sleep becomes difficult. In recent years, in the throes of a trial or some other exacting event, I have turned increasingly to over-the-counter medications as a refuge from insomnia. While I’m under the arresting spell of these elixirs, nothing, not the pounding hoofbeats of the horsemen and their apocalypse, can rouse me.

Tonight, the incessant ringing in my ears brings me to a state of semiconscious stupor. Then I realize that this sound is the phone. I feel weight on my body. Nikki has reached across me and taken the receiver from the phone on my bedside stand. In my dreamlike state I hear silence as she listens, then her voice.

“Who is this? Who are you?”

Then a return to quiet, the peace of silence. I slip back again, into the abyss, the sleep of the innocent.

I feel the sharp point of bone in my back. The light is on. I fight the grip of the medication. Focus my eyes with some effort at the clock in the radio next to me on the stand. It is three-forty in the morning.

“Who the hell is calling at this hour?” I find speech difficult, a little slurred.

I roll over, try to shake the cobwebs. Nikki is still holding the receiver, but it is away from her ear. She is kneeling up on the mattress, the blankets and sheets pushed to the foot of the bed. I can hear the hum of an unbroken dial tone from the receiver in her hand. Whoever it was has hung up.

“Who was it?” I say.

“They didn’t leave a name. It was for you,” she says, “but they wouldn’t wait.”

“Yeah.” I’m rolling over, yawning, covering my mouth with the back of one hand, like let’s talk about it in the morning.

Nikki’s bolt upright staring at me, like I should be more curious.

“What did they want?”

“They left a message.”

“Yes?” I’m fighting to keep my eyes open.

“The man on the phone says that if you know what’s good for your family, your wife and your daughter,” she says, “you’ll charge the Russian with the Scofield murders.”

“Damn it.” I say this under my breath. It has started. The crank phone calls, the crackpots who seem always to follow the high-profile cases. From time to time, in my practice, we have had to change our home number, unlisted as it is, twice in the same month. So relentless are some in this army of the unhinged.

“Oh come over here.” I smile, reach out to put my arm around Nikki’s shoulder, to give her a hug, an attempt to comfort, to lull her back to sleep.

She pulls away from me, fear in her eyes.

“He told me that Sarah, he used her
name
,” she says. “He told me that Sarah was real pretty.” She’s talking about the voice on the phone again.

“He said she was lucky we could afford the private tuition—at the Westchester School,” she says. Nikki is looking at me, her gaze a mixture of pain and contempt, an expression in my wife reserved only for acts of betrayal.

“They know where Sarah goes to school.” She looks at me, an expression so cold it would fracture tempered steel.

“You did this to us,” she says. “To help a friend who was apparently more important than your own family.”

Chapter Twenty-four

T
his morning I’m picking little bits of lost sleep from the corner of my eye, yawning. After Nikki’s fear turned to fury last night because of our mystery phone caller, I never got back to the sheets, but spent the night on the lumpy couch in the living room. It was my only refuge. Nikki would not leave it alone. Three times with me on the verge of sleep, she got into it again, until I finally left the bed.

For the moment I have other problems. Claude is in my office giving me the latest on Jeanette Scofield.

“Maybe she felt it was her obligation to move his things out of the office,” I say. “Maybe the school needed the space.”

“Sure,” he says, “two days after the funeral? With hubby still warm?” Claude’s face is a cynic’s mask. “The lady must have a driven house-cleaning ethic,” he says. Claude’s nailed me this morning in my office, early, on his way to work. And he is not happy.

Dusalt has been rummaging around the university looking for anything that might home into a lead on the witness in the trees. In his travels he has discovered that Jeanette Scofield cleared some documents and books out of Abbott Scofield’s campus office the day before police searched the place. He was not told this during his several questionings of the widow. And like a good cop, he is now suspicious.

He tells me that according to people who work in the building, Jeanette and Jess Amara carted boxes of books and papers out of the office and loaded them into two cars in the parking lot. “One of them was a city police unit,” he says.

He is convinced that this is something more than just compulsive neatness.

“Have you talked to her?” I ask. “Maybe she still has the stuff.”

“You bet. I beat a path to her door when I found out,” he says. “She has a shit-load of textbooks on birds, all musty, and stacked in her garage in boxes. She told me I could take anything I wanted.”

I make a face, as if to say “see, no foul.”

“But all the papers,” he says, “Scofield’s files, his memos and letters, they all got trashed.” He looks at me from under arched eyebrows. “Courtesy of an incinerator, in the basement of city hall.” He motions toward my office window in the direction of the large brick building across the square.

Neat and orderly as they are, it seems brother Jess doesn’t mind polluting the air. Any hints as to the identity of the prime witness that Abbott Scofield might have committed to written memoranda, hunches he might have had, are now wafting on the winds.

“Did she have an explanation?”

“Overflowing with them,” he says. “More stories than Dickens. She says she didn’t think the papers were important. She says she had no place to store them. She says it hurt too much to go through them, so her brother took care of them all. Touching and sensitive guy that he is.” Claude’s expression is one of calculated disbelief.

“Are there any backup files?” I’m thinking specifically about computers. Maybe the documents were done on a word processor. If so, backup disks of the materials might exist.

He shakes his head. “The steno pool used by Scofield, in the department,” he says. “Just our luck. It used old Selectrics.” These are IBM typewriters, one step up from stone tablets.

“If the faculty wanted copies, they had to order them made themselves,” he says, “at the central copy center, where I’m told the machines didn’t work half the time.” It seems the funds for new equipment in the department somehow found their way into rosewood paneling for the chancellor’s office and the silver service he and his wife use for entertaining.

“I’m told any copies Scofield might have made would have been stored in his office files. The ones that were burned. Circle-jerk city,” he says. This is how Claude describes the merry chase he’s been on at the U.

Then he smiles at me.

“But the bastards missed one,” he says. He pulls a folded piece of paper from his pocket, little slips stapled to one corner, and hands this to me.

It’s a printed form with spaces and blanks, an application for travel expenses and per diem from the university. This one is made out in the name of Abbott Scofield but unsigned, and seeks $526.56 in expenses.

“Where did you get this?”

“It was in the steno pool for typing when Mrs. Clean and the Ty-D-bol Man came in to do their deed,” he says. “Seems Scofield took a recent trip.”

I look at the point of destination on the form, “San Diego.” The form is dated eight days before his death, for travel that took place a week before that. There is no purpose for this sojourn. That line on the form is blank.